Your Monday Briefing: Russian Atrocities Reports

Hello. We cover reports of Russian atrocities, a boiling political crisis in Pakistan and a Taliban ban on poppy cultivation for opium.

Resistance: This is how Kyiv has withstood Russian attacks and how already legendary fighters the Russians repelled from the small garrison town of Vasylkiv.

Context: Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has repeatedly tried — and failed — to subjugate the Ukraine.

Training effects: The war pushed the cost of food in east africawhich is facing what could be its worst drought in four decades.

State of the war:

Other developments:

The move – a defiant attempt by Khan to stay in power, despite lose the support of the army — threatens to plunge the country into a constitutional crisis. On Saturday, Khan said he would not accept the result of the votedismissing it as part of an American plot against him.

Opposition leaders accused Khan of high treason and asked the country The Supreme Court must intervene, calling it “unprecedented” and a “flagrant violation” of the Pakistani Constitution. A hearing was scheduled for Monday.

To analyse: The move risked destabilizing the fragile democracy of Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country that supports the taliban. Since Pakistan became an independent country in 1947, none of its prime ministers have completed a full term.

Profile: Khan, a former cricket starwas elected in 2018 on a nationalist promise to fight corruption and steer Pakistan away from the United States, with which he had a troubled history. If Khan is ousted, many experts say Pakistan could grow closer to the United States and the West.

Taliban ban poppy cultivation

The insurgents have become the rulers of Afghanistan prohibits the cultivation of opium flowers on Sunday. The decree also prohibits the use, sale, transfer, purchase, import and export of wine as well as heroin and other drugs.

This decision will have far-reaching consequences for the many farmers who oriented towards illicit culture amid the country’s brutal drought and economic crisis.

Many farmers had planted the crop – which can be stored for some time after harvest – as an investment. They expected supply to shrink and prices to rise, even though they knew the Taliban might decide to restrict cultivation. The Taliban’s announcement on Sunday came during the poppy harvest.

The context: Afghanistan accounts for approximately 80 percent of the world’s opium supply.

Context: In the 1990s, the Taliban made several half-hearted attempts to restrict opium before enacting a ban on opium poppy cultivation shortly before the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, after which Taliban have looked to culture to fuel their war machine for two decades.

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Asia and the Pacific

The Thai government is organizing a campaign for the world to call the Thai capital Krung Thep Maha Nakhon (Bangkok). Thai citizens would prefer their leaders to focus on fixing the country’s ailing economy.

ARTS AND IDEAS

A storm of microplastics

As long as there has been sea life, there has been sea snow – an unrelenting drizzle of death and trash pouring from the surface of the sea into its depths.

Now tiny pieces of plastic have infiltrated the slowly sinking flakes, which are the main food source of the deep seas and a pipeline that transports carbon from the ocean to the seabed. Microplastics, normally buoyant, sink with the flakes.

This is new information: scientists initially assumed that the plastic was mostly floating on the surface. But a recent model found that 99.8% of the plastic that entered the ocean after 1950 sank below the first few hundred feet. Scientists have found 10,000 times more microplastics on the seabed than in contaminated surface waters.

They are just beginning to understand the consequences. Because microplastics add to the surface of sea snow, the mix could transport more carbon to the seabed and alter our planet’s ancient cooling process.

Sinking microplastics can also damage deep-sea food webs. “Plastics are a diet pill for these animals,” a carbon cycle scientist told The Times.

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